12 - How to draw star square circle shape in Photoshop CC

Hi there, in this video we're going to make shapes, and more shapes, and other shapes, and aah, the rectangle with a corner on it. There's a star with another star. Oh, it is Shape-tastic. Let's get in there now and learn how to do this properly in Photoshop.

To get started, basically we're going to be using this little menu item here. So I click, hold, and drop it down. I just click, hold, hold, hold my mouse key down until I get these options. Let's start with the Ellipse Tool. What we're going to do is, up the top here you can pick a fill for your Ellipse. So clickety, click, then pick anything you like. If you want to pick a more custom color than just the random ones in here. You can click on this little kind of rainbow icon here. You get that Color Picker that we've used a few times. Slide the Hue up until you find something you want to use. Pick this one. Click 'OK'. You can kind of click anywhere up here to get rid of that Fill drop down.

So what we want to do is click, hold, and drag. And you'll get kind of any old shape. So if I go to 'Edit', 'Step Backward'. And what we want to do is-- we did this with the Rectangle Marquee Tool. Who remembers what key we hold down on our keyboard to get a perfect circle? Yep, you remember, it's Shift. So hold 'Shift' down, kind of makes the height and width locked in. If you get it to a size, and you're like, "No, not quite right" you don't have to keep going back, you can go to 'Edit', 'Transform Path', and go to 'Scale'. And the same thing, hold down 'Shift' on one of these edges, drag it out, and you can make it nice and big. I'm making mine super big. Something like that. When you're finished, hit 'Return' on your keyboard, otherwise, doesn't work. So hit 'Return'. That's how to draw an Ellipse.

The cool thing about using this particular tool here, these little shape parts, is that they are scalable, they're vector. They can go up and down in size, no problem. Let's look at some of the other shapes. We're going to use a rectangle. It seems pretty boring but hold on, because there's some things you can do with it. So with it selected, pick a 'Fill Color'. I'm going to use black in this case. There he is. Don't have that selected, so 'Edit', 'Step Backward'. Don't worry about the color for the moment. What you can do is, see this Layers Panel, you can click in this dark gray area, kind of makes sure nothing is selected. Now I can pick a Fill Color of black, Stroke is the line around the outside, I'm going to turn it on just to show you. So I'm going to have a white liner on the outside. It's going to be, say 3 pixels, just for an example, don't really want a Stroke but I want to show you how it works.

What we're going to do is we're going to draw a rectangle, kind of about here. And you're like, “Yeah, that's a rectangle, Dan." What you've got to see is, this Properties over here. The cool thing about using this particular tool is that these can be adjusted. You can see that the Stroke here can be made really thick. That's too thick. You can decide where that Stroke sits, which is this option, I think here. No, it is this option, the first one. So there's the inside of the square, that is across the-- you can see either side of that square. Or this one is the outside of the square. I don't want any of them. I don't like you, Stroke, I click on it. And I'm just clicking on the Stroke, that little icon there.

See this little red line? That means, 'No Stroke', please. Awesome! Other things you can do with rectangles, still not very exciting, is these corners here. Yours is probably defaulted to this, where it's got a dark gray box. Watch, click it. It's not really obvious but if you have it off, so it should look like this, and what I'm going to do is, you can change one particular corner. So what I'm going to do, say 20 pixels in this corner. Hit 'Return', and you can see, I've got a 20 pixel radius. Not probably big enough for you to see. 50 pixel radius. I'm going to zoom in so we can all see it together a little easier. The person editing this video is probably like "You should have done that earlier, you've had to move around." So, a nice little trick with this is--

Who knows what 50 pixels is, it really depends on the image size. So what I find is quite useful is, see these little icons here? Pretty much all the icons in Photoshop, you can hover above them, see this like little hand width arrows? Click, hold, and drag it to the right. You can see it goes up, and you can see my little--- let's go changing over here. Drag them back to go to a square, drag them back. You can lock them together so when you do drag them all up they all go together, or back to 0.

What I want is I just want this one to be a little bit rounded, and we're going to reshape it later on when we do our Type. It's going to be that box there eventually. Couple of other things we'll do, is I'm going to zoom out, 'Command -' And I want to do stars up in the corner, these guys here. So stars are not tricky, but-- watch this, click and hold down there. They come into this one, called the Polygon Tool, give him a click. And by default it's going to give me a Polygon. I'm not sure what shape that is, Pentagon? I want to say, Pentagon. And you can change the sides up here, I can have 10 sides. Now it's a something I can't name. Let's go to 'Undo'. I'm using the shortcut, so 'Edit'. 'Step Backward'. It's this one here. On a Mac it's pretty crazy, it's 'Command-Option-Z', steps backwards. On a PC it's 'Control-Alt-Z'. Just kind of steps backwards. I use that quite a bit. I'm probably going to use that from now on in the course. If you see me going backwards and undoing, I'm just going to this option here using my sneaky shortcut.

So what I want to do is, I want a five-sided star but what I want to do is, see this little cog here? Before you start drawing, click on 'Star', play around with the inset, 50% is going to give you a traditional star. See this one here, you can undo it, and just experiment. Have a little play around with the indents by, like-- I quite like this one, if you get down to like 15 and then turn the sides up to 50 you get this kind of, like starburst. That's quite a handy one for, I don't know. How I buy my wine? I look at the label, and does it have lots of these gold stickers on it? I don't even read them, but that's how I buy my wine.

With this layer selected I'm going to click on the trash to get rid of it, and I'm going to get my Star. So 'Polygon Tool', Side, back to '5'. Click on the little cog, and I'm going to say 50%. If you go to 80% they're going to be super spiky. You can smooth the edges of it as well, just have a little experiment. Just going to do a traditional star. I'm going to draw out-- if you want it straight, it's our magical key that we've done. We've used it a few times now. At the moment it's just going to be any old size. So I'm going to drag out, and hold down the 'Shift' key. You see, it kind of locks it into like more usable shapes. It's not straight up and down, I don't know why, but you can, this way, here we go, eventually I got it. So hold 'Shift' and just kind of rotate it around until you get the kind of-- it's locked it into a symmetrical shape, that's what I want to say.

Let's have a look at changing the color of this. So with this layer selected, at the top here I'm going to pick white. One thing is that, say this color disappeared, it's probably because you're on your Move Tool. If you're on this layer on a Move Tool-- it's great for moving around but if you want to go back to shape it just have this tool selected, make sure that layer is selected and this will pop back up. You could leave now, because that's almost it for shapes. I'm going to look at some opacity because I want to recreate this kind of star effect, and this thing here. Hang around, I'm actually going to draw that circle down there as well. You can totally leave if you know how to change the opacity already.

I want to transform this guy to make him smaller. So layer selected, 'Edit', 'Transform', 'Scale'. Now what I'm going to do for the rest of this course is, that is a super long way, I'm going to use the shortcut and it's this one here, Free Transform. It does a bit of all of these things, does scale really easily. I'm going to use 'Command T'. You don't have to, you can come in here and use this version. 'Command T' is just a super good shortcut to learn. It's 'Control T' on a PC, so hold 'Command T' and same thing, hold 'Shift' in the corners and I can resize it. So I want it to be about that, hit 'Return'. I want another version of it so I'm going to right click it and I'm going to say 'Duplicate Layer'. 'Polygon 2', click 'OK'. And what I'm going to do is, the one at the bottom probably. So this guy's on top, this guy's on the bottom. I'm going to stretch him out using my super new shortcut, 'Command T' and I'm going to scale it out, so if I hold 'Shift' I can drag it out there, then I can grab anyway about the center and try and line them back up, and that generally works.

Another little shortcut I'm going to share with you. I'm going to hit 'Esc', 'Esc' is, "I didn't mean it". I'm going to go back to where it was. I've still got two stars on top of each other. This bottom one though, I'm going to hit 'Command T', 'Control T' on a PC. Holding 'Shift' makes that come from the top left. If I hold 'Shift Option' on a Mac, or 'Alt' on a PC, so look down your keyboard, hold 'Shift', and if you're on a Mac hold 'Shift Option'. If you're on a PC, hold 'Shift Alt'. What it does is, can you see the difference? It resizes from the center. I don't want to like bamboozle you too much for shortcuts. You don't have to, you can just line it up, use 'Shift' and just line it up but I want to make mine a bit bigger than it was, about there. Nothing really happens, except this bottom one here I want to lower the opacity, see the Opacity slider here? It's going to lower it down until I find something I like. I'm actually going to use the Transform. I'm going to make it a bit bigger. We've got Drop Shadows on that one. That's going to make it look nicer later on but we're not there yet.

If I want to re-- I'm going to resize this top one as well. Actually I want both to go a bit smaller. Holding down both those keys. You, you. I'm going to do the same thing for the circle. So this guy selected, my Ellipse, I'm going to duplicate him. So right click, 'Duplicate Layer'. You should give them a name. I'm going to be honest with you, I never bother unless I'm sending it to somebody that I need to impress. I'm going to my 'Command T'. I'm going to grab one of these side bits, hold 'Shift Option' on my Mac. Make it a bit bigger. What I'm probably going to do is I've got the big one on top, I'm going to put it underneath.

With it selected I'm going to go here, and pick a new color. We're going to look at specific colors that might match the background in a later tutorial but that's what I'm doing. So this guy's on top, this guy's underneath and he's just a little bit bigger. You could play with the opacity of this one as well. Looks kind of cool. Black bar here, I lower the opacity of lots of them, just to kind of, I don't know, start showing through things. It's kind of cool when there's a bit of transparency going.

Last thing I want to do is, I want to get this-- I want it to be longer, so I'm going to use 'Command T' on a Mac, 'Control T' on a PC, and just drag it out. The cool thing about live shapes, can you see that corner is still preserved. Doesn't matter how long, it doesn't kind of distort. So I'm going to drag it so it's off, even past the edge, it doesn't matter. 'Enter' on my keyboard to finish it, and I'm going to use it as a kind of an off-page into the bleed type box. One other thing I want is a little circle down here. I'm going to be lazy. Instead of drawing out an Ellipse and giving it a color I'm going to grab this guy, I'm going to right click it, I'm going to duplicate him. Yes, I'm going to give this one a name because you're watching me, let's go for 'Small Circle'. I'm going to Transform it. Holding down my shortcut keys, grabbing anywhere but the center, and it's going to go down here, somewhere. Hit 'Return' on your keyboard.

That's our epic shape building video done. Let's get into the next video where we start adding Type, and then we'll do Drop Shadows. Loads more to do but let's do it in a following video. Bye now.